Slashdot Mirror
ESA Shows Off Quadcopter Landing Concept For Mars Rovers
coondoggie writes Taking a page from NASA's rocket powered landing craft from its most recent Mars landing mission, the European Space Agency is showing off a quadcopter that the organization says can steer itself to smoothly lower a rover onto a safe patch of the rocky Martian surface. The ESA said its dropship, known as the StarTiger's Dropter is indeed a customized quadcopter drone that uses a GPS, camera and inertial systems to fly into position, where it then switches to vision-based navigation supplemented by a laser range-finder and barometer to lower and land a rover autonomously.
Here is the official press release, which states the real goal of the project:
Starting from scratch for the eight-month project, the Dropter team was challenged to produce vision-based navigation and hazard detection and avoidance for the dropship.
The quadcopter was just a COTS stand-in for testing their software.
a customized quadcopter drone that uses a GPS, camera and inertial systems to fly into position .....
Yup, hate to break it to you rocket scientists at NASA, but there is a slight flaw in this design for use on Mars.
I hate to break it to you, but ESA is the rocket scientists in Europe, not NASA....